Business process management (BPM) offers a programmatic structure for designing transactions and executing them using automated decisions, tasks and sequence flows. For example, an insurance company can use BPM to automate the steps involved in processing insurance claims. BPM solutions typically include a process definition tool, an engine that executes process definitions, and tools that aid process monitoring.
A process definition tool allows a process designer to specify a definition of a business process using a particular business process language. One exemplary language is the business process execution language (BPEL). BPEL is intended for business processes that interact with external entities through web service operations. BPEL's messaging facilities depend on the use of the web services description language (WSDL) to describe outgoing and incoming messages.
When a BPEL process is defined, it can be deployed as a web application using the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) web services deployment model. The J2EE web services deployment model requires a set of deployment descriptors that define how to deploy and assemble components into a specific environment. These deployment descriptors may include, for example, a web component deployment descriptor, a web services deployment descriptor, and a BPEL application deployment descriptor. The web component deployment descriptor describes web components (e.g., servlets, Java server pages (JSPs), HTML files, etc.) used by a web module, environment variables, and security settings. The web services deployment descriptor defines web services produced by the business process and declares deployment characteristics of the web services. The BPEL application descriptor defines one or more queues for web services of the business process. The deployment descriptors are typically written manually by developers familiar with the J2EE web services deployment model.